My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror (Hardcover)

by Louis J. Freeh (Author)
Key Phrases: crime site, New York, White House, Bill Clinton (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Freeh defends his performance as FBI director (1993-2001) and retaliates against Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies and Bill Clinton's My Life in this smooth memoir, written with the help of Means. "I spent most of the almost eight years as director investigating the man who had appointed me," Freeh declares on the book's first page, but readers expecting juicy revelations about those investigations are going to be disappointed. Freeh goes into fascinating detail when describing the FBI's work on the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia-the most damning thing he has to say about Clinton is that Clinton didn't push for the prosecution of the bombers. Freeh's recounting of his work as an FBI agent in 1970s, when his team helped eviscerate the power of the Italian mafia in New York, is similarly generous with details. And his accounts of his childhood in New Jersey and his years working his way through Rutgers are also engaging. Freeh argues convincingly against the establishment of a separate Domestic Intelligence Service, for the FBI's use of international agents and for a major investment into the Bureau's technological capacity-it's horrifying to realize that the agency has less computer power than any of America's major enemies. In a few pages of near end of the book, Freeh lambastes Clarke, calling him a "self-appointed Paul Revere" and a "second-tier player." He also accuses Clarke of deception, alleging that Clarke lied or distorted information in five places, including Clarke's assertion that Freeh is a member of Opus Dei. If corroborated, these accusations may deal a serious blow Clarke's reputation. When it comes to the Clinton investigations, however, Freeh doesn't really deliver anything new. And his explanations for the rift between them come off as disingenuous. "Maybe I was, in Clinton's eyes, too much the altar boy," Freeh muses on page 17. More than two hundred pages later, he reveals that he snubbed the President's first two collegial gestures, and elsewhere Freeh drops references to his close friendship with H.W. Bush, who worked as director of the CIA before he was president and after whom Freeh names the FBI's new command center in 1999. "We had differences of temperament," Freeh acknowledges about Clinton. His book would have been stronger if he acknowledged more directly that he and Clinton had differences of politics, too. After all, it's to Clinton's credit that he appointed Freeh despite those differences, and to Freeh's credit that he didn't allow them to hamper his excellent performance on the Oklahoma bombing and Robert Hanssen cases, among others.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
For nearly a dozen years, Louis J. Freeh has been pointedly silent about the man who appointed him director of the FBI. That moratorium ends officially and loudly with the publication of Freeh's My FBI, a scorching account of his relationship with Bill Clinton and of leading the bureau at a time when, as Freeh writes, the president's "scandals . . . never ended." To understand the depth of Freeh's antipathy, consider this one anecdote: Sometime after he resigned in 2001, Freeh ran into the former White House counsel who had recommended Freeh for the job. The lawyer reported that Clinton had just complained to him that the worst advice the lawyer ever gave him was to appoint Freeh. "I wear it as a badge of honor," Freeh writes. And that's just the second chapter.

How did it come to this? A president's relationship with an FBI director should be a mixture of hands-off and hands-on. Unlike cabinet members, who serve at the pleasure of a president, directors are now given 10-year terms -- in part to avoid another 48-year reign like that of J. Edgar Hoover, and in part to provide insulation from political pressure. A potentially secret police force constitutes a great opportunity for abuse by presidents and a threat to be used against them. But even if an FBI director cannot expect to be best friends with the president, he should, as Freeh writes, "be able to go directly to the president, sit down with him and say You should know about this." In Freeh and Clinton's case, there were vital issues to discuss and collaborate on. But the problem for Freeh was that he never could get to those hands-on moments. "There was always some new investigation brewing, some new calamity bubbling just below the headlines ." By the time Freeh resigned, he had met with Clinton at most three times.

My FBI is no ordinary Washington memoir. To be sure, Freeh tells a number of engaging stories about his rise from FBI street agent -- one undercover assignment entailed parading around nude in the locker room of a local health club frequented by a prominent mobster -- to his mob-busting days as a federal prosecutor in the famed Southern District of New York. There are a few too many gratuitous bromides bestowed on colleagues and even neighbors. But these accolades serve the purpose, intended or not, of contrasting starkly with Freeh's portrait of Clinton as a man whose only moral compass is political expediency. When a judge cited Clinton in 1999 for contempt for lying in the Paula Jones case, Freeh describes it as a disgrace equal only to Richard M. Nixon's. If it had been him, Freeh writes, "I would be so devastated that I might never show my face in public again. The ex-president, however, seems to suffer no such pangs of conscience."

In retrospect, it should have been clear to both men that this was a doomed relationship. Could there be two more different people? Freeh, a former altar boy and a moralist at his core, always carried a worn prayer book in his suit jacket. But Freeh was impressed with the breadth of Clinton's questions in their first meeting, and by the time Clinton assures Freeh there will be no political interference if he takes the job, Freeh has joined the legions of the charmed. When Clinton sits down, without prompting, to write a birthday greeting to Freeh's 7-year-old son, the deal is sealed.

Freeh acknowledges making mistakes in the relationship. He lacked tact in trying to distance himself. He turned down an early dinner invitation to the White House with the Clintons and Tom Hanks; he even sent back his White House pass with a terse note, indicating he would sign in every time he came calling. "It was seemingly a declaration of open hostility on my part," he writes. But, he argues, "I was the nation's top cop," and just a few months into his tenure, Clinton was already the subject of a criminal investigation in what became known as Whitewater. "Until the matter was sorted out," Freeh writes, "I had to be accountable for every trip I made to the building where the president worked and lived."

The final stake through the relationship's heart, however, was the president's response to the June 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, an American military facility in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 Americans were killed. It is fitting that Freeh opens My FBI with Khobar Towers; there was no case he cared more deeply about or pursued more relentlessly. It became his Moby-Dick. Only hours after the bombing, Clinton dispatched the FBI to track down the perpetrators, promising the nation they would not go unpunished. Freeh personally oversaw the case, and when it soon began to appear that top Iranian government officials might be behind the attack, Freeh says the investigation stalled: "Where I found myself most stymied [was] not halfway around the world on the Arabian Peninsula but at home, a half dozen blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue." The problem, in Freeh's view, was that in May 1997 an Iranian moderate, Mohammad Khatami, had been elected president and seemed to be the United States' best hope of normalizing relationships. "The Khobar Towers investigation was not going to get in the way of that," Freeh writes.

The tale of duplicity Freeh tells is complicated, but the basic outlines are these: The Saudis, who had suspects in custody, had communicated in a limited way their findings of Iranian involvement to the FBI and the White House. To put a legal case together, however, the bureau needed access to the suspects, and Freeh was told by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, that this would happen only if the president and his top aides exerted pressure on Crown Prince Abdullah, the kingdom's de facto leader. The Saudis, however, said they were receiving U.S. signals to back off, not to bull ahead with the investigation. Clinton and his aides denied this to Freeh, but in the end, Freeh came to believe the Saudis' version.

Among the most telling incidents for Freeh was a meeting that occurred in September 1998 between the crown prince and the president at the Hay Adams hotel in Washington. Freeh was assured by Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, that Clinton had pressed Abdullah for U.S. access to the Saudi-held suspects, but others present told Freeh that Clinton barely raised the subject and sympathized with the Saudis' reluctance to cooperate. Clinton, Freeh writes, then promptly asked Abdullah for a contribution to his presidential library. (I learned through my own reporting at the time that Freeh later secretly referred Clinton's library request for grand jury investigation, but he does not reveal this here, presumably because of grand jury secrecy rules.) Frustrated, Freeh then made an extraordinary out-of-chain of command pitch to former president George H.W. Bush, who also was scheduled to visit with Abdullah. Freeh called Bush, much favored in Saudi Arabia due to the 1991 Gulf War, and asked him to make the request that Clinton wasn't making. The former president agreed, and two days later, Abdullah told Freeh that the suspects would be made available. "I have no doubt that, but for President Bush's personal intervention, we would never have gotten access," Freeh writes. Six weeks later, the information from the interviews and other evidence turned over by the Saudis showed incontrovertibly that the attack had been funded, Freeh writes, by senior Iranian officials. He adds that, after he reported these findings, Berger convened a meeting in the West Wing's Situation Room to discuss them. But instead of dealing with the evidence of Iranian complicity, Freeh writes, the meeting focused on how to deal with the press and Congress should the news leak. (A "Script A" and a "Script B" had been prepared.) No other moment in his eight years matched the disappointment of that meeting: "We had the goods on them, cold, yet the Clinton administration miserably failed to seek any redress," Freeh writes. The case limped along until the new President Bush took office. Six months later, a grand jury indicted 14 defendants, mostly the active participants in the plot, and accused the Iranian government of directing the attack -- though no Iranian officials were indicted, a fact that Freeh curiously fails to explain.

Freeh devotes a scant two chapters to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath, explaining that enough newsprint and news hours already have been dedicated to what went wrong without his rehashing the details. This will be too little for many; critics have blasted Freeh for pursuing his Khobar Towers obsession while his FBI missed the gathering al Qaeda plot at home. Though Freeh resigned three months before Sept. 11, the plot was assembled on his watch, as was the FBI counterterrorism apparatus that failed to thwart it. But he has a few points about Sept. 11 that he is determined to make. While acknowledging "many shortcomings" of his own, Freeh blames Congress for the much-reported antiquated state of the FBI's computer system, pointing out that the bureau begged Congress for funds that were not forthcoming. He complains that from 2000-02, the bureau asked for 1,900 new employees for its counterterrorism program and got only 76.

But the heart of Freeh's complaint is that until Sept. 11, terrorism was viewed by both the Clinton and Bush administrations as a law enforcement issue -- sifting through bomb sites looking for evidence, as the FBI did with Khobar Towers -- and not as an act of war, as he now argues that it should have been. "I don't know an agent who thought that was sufficient to the cause, or anyone who believed that a criminal investigation was a reasonable alternative to military or diplomatic action," he writes. The United States had gone after Osama bin Laden with a few Tomahawk cruise missiles in 1998 in retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; the CIA had made covert attempts to get bin Laden; and the State Department had harangued his Taliban patrons. But these attempts were all lame, Freeh argues, because the United States lacked the political spine to put its full force behind the efforts. Freeh points out that the FBI had helped secure indictments against bin Laden in 1998 and 1999 and, along with the CIA, missed nabbing Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Sept. 11 plot's mastermind, in Qatar in 1996 when he was apparently tipped off by a Qatari official. In 2000, Freeh flew to Pakistan and personally appealed to President Pervez Musharraf to pressure his Taliban allies to arrest bin Laden. "If [the U.S.] government had a different mind-set, the secretaries of state and defense would have been in Lahore with me, or instead of me," Freeh writes. This negligence, he argues, emboldened the terrorists. "The image of a lumbering giant stumbling around with a sign on its back reading 'Kick Me' was not lost on our enemies," he notes.

My FBI is ultimately a sad tale, and it's clear Freeh saw it this way, too. He had planned to resign before the end of Clinton's term but held off until the president left office because he worried that Clinton might replace him with someone who would damage the FBI. "Not only was he actively hostile toward me, he was hostile to the FBI generally," Freeh writes. "My departure might be one last opportunity for retaliation."

Reviewed by Elsa Walsh
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312321899
• ISBN-13: 978-0312321895
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #263,289 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #28 in	Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( C ) > Clinton, Bill
  #61 in	Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Political Science > Levels of Government > Intelligence Agencies

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

90 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Candid...and respectfully very critical of President Clinton, October 11, 2005

By	Dr. Nazareth V. Asorian "Precious Souls: A Cu... (Florida, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Louis J. Freeh, the former FBI director(1993-2001), has put together a string of life's accomplishments, struggles, obstacles, and frustrations presented in the clarity of the moment, as he sees it.

The chronicle is his own biography, and nearly half of the book encompasses educational background, and experiences with New York city crimes while working in the US Attorney's office. But, make no mistake! The theme of the book craftily pivots on issues that involve his difficult relationship with Bill Clinton, who had chosen him, as a "law enforcement legend", and later regretful as his "worst" appointment.

Freeh graduated from the New York University Law Scool in 1975, worked as an FBI agent from 1975-1981, and then in the US Attorney's office in New York city until 1991. He was appointed as the US District Court from 1991-1993.

The book is interesting, informative, captivating, and easy to read. There is a hint of venom that Mr. Freeh carefully guards, as he delves into his chapter critical of his boss, his President, our President -- intelligent and politically skillful, but a crack in his thought process, which let the truth slip by...just slip by!

The following are the highlights that troubled Mr. Freeh:
>The Kobar Towers investigation in Saudi Arabia, which he believes Mr. Clinton ignored, and the interference in the probing of the matter...allowing the terrorists to escape.
>He is surprised by the underestimation of casualties by Mr. Clinton in his book "My Life"...by as many as 70...and even the misrepresentation or the inference that these terrorists were caught.
>Modernization of FBI computer system, requesting $90 million but only receiving two million.
>Pardoning of Marc Rich whose former wife donated one million to the Clintons.
>Scandels of the nineties, particularly the Lewensky scandle that plagued the presidency.
>Views on Robert Hanssen -- the double agent.

Freeh underscores the difficulties he had in dealing with his job, because of Mr. Clinton's never-ending scandels, rumors, and personal conflicts, which triggered FBI investigations. His views are forthright, and seemingly based on facts and candid recollections. Understandably, perhaps, this book is in contrast to Mr. Clinton's "My Life", and ultimately it will be up to the reader to decide which one prevails.

Character does matter! The book is a credible source of information, and does indulge in the strengths of FBI and future imptovements. It is a worthy read and will no doubt cause some political repercussions and debates on the airways.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Profile of Louis Freeh , October 30, 2005

By	LobstahLovah - See all my reviews

150 of 152 people found the following review helpful:

Foreword: When will Amazon clean the closet and let people post a review only after the reviewer has actually bought the book here rather than just post their incorrigible perceptions of the author and abuse this venue as a place to vent anger? Amazon . . . ?

My Review: I actually did pre-order this book from Amazon prior to its publication and I read it entirely. What most surprised me in this book was that his professional relationship with Janet Reno was not as tense as I had thought it to be. Overall. I found this book to be very engrossing; I could not put it down.

As the photo on the jacket of this book suggests, this is a profile of Louis Freeh, by Louis Freeh. It is not a personal vendetta against the Clintons as some have suggested. Yes, Mr Freeh does write about the atmosphere between the FBI and the White House but he does not fan flames here, he simply states his views without placing guilty convictions. As Mr Freeh clearly outlines, he did not choose to investigate the Clintons, that is a legal process which was handed to him and yet, the top cop can not be expected to befriend the one whom he is lawfully obligated to investigate while upholding the laws as outlined in the Constitution of the United States of America.

Mr Freeh begins the book with a chapter on Khobar Towers and how that 1996 terrorist attack which killed 19 of our US Military members in Saudi Arabia profoundly affected him throughout his tenure as FBI director. Some have said that he jumps all over the place between chapters and subjects but I found that he states his views and gives examples, sometimes elaborating on facts to exemplify his points and with ethical reasoning to back them up. Example; Mr Freeh shares insight into his relationship with Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the USA, how his many requests to Prince Bandar were not outright rejected, Prince Bandar needed the request to be made directly by the President of the USA to pressure the co-operation between the FBI and Saudi Arabia on the Khobar Towers investigation. Ultimately, President Bush 41 was able to jump start better co-operation between the FBI and the Saudi's internal investigation after just one conversation with the Prince. While there are vast differences in our cultures, Saudi Arabia is not our enemy, the terrorists are.

This book is so much more than historical events. Mr Freeh shares with us details into his inner self, of his strict Catholic upbringing and how events throughout his life helped to shape his moral compass. He shares details of his parents' Italian and German heritage, how childhood friends became lifelong friends, how his desire to go to USMA West Point was squashed by one priest who told him that he was not college material and how that had a lasting effect on his decision making (never take the first no as an absolute answer and BTW, his eldest son is at USNA Annapolis), how his youngest brothers' rebellion against the church & school and his later development taught them both an important lesson, how events throughout his college years at Rutgers during the civil rights movement affected life on campus and his own life, how discrimination that his mother experienced as a young Italian immigrant convinced him to excuse himself from judging a case of discrimination years later, his many years and events that occurred while prosecuting the mafia (notably, the Pizza Connection with Sicilian mafia and drugs) details of many cases including the Olympic bombing in Atlanta, how the media leaks information incorrectly and prematurely and causes major delays in progress but also how the media helped to capture the Unabomber.

Mr Freeh takes responsibility for errors in the FBI's handling of cases such as, FBI agents inadvertently leaving out 3,000 pages of evidence during the McVeigh trial (Oklahoma) which caused > one month delay in McVeigh's execution. In another instance, he tells how an FBI agent lied on the witness stand and how the jury felt forced to acquit a criminal they thought was overwhelmingly guilty based on lack of trust in that agent. But we also get to hear many successes in the FBI including the reshaping of the course material at the FBI Academy at Quantico to make ethics a high priority, the creation of an FBI Academy in Budapest and how that fostered greater global cooperation in the law enforcement community. We hear of many successes and the dedication and perseverance of many which paved the way for success and growth.

I got a lot out of this book and recommend it as a great read for anyone from teenagers who seek moral guidance to those who want a reflection of what it's like to be the USA's top cop and how he made it there from student, to agent, to prosecutor, to judge, to FBI director. The dedication, the sacrifices, the ups and downs.

If you ever read this Mr Freeh, I thank you, for your dedication to our US Military and to their families, to not let the Khobar Towers case 'just go away' as some had wished.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insider View of a Critical Agency at a Critical Time, November 29, 2005

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There was a time when the FBI could do no wrong. J. Edgar Hoover carefully crafted an image of excellence that, true or not, made the agency greatly respected. Later came Ruby Ridge and Waco. In the darkness that followed Bill Clinton appointed Louis Freeh to be the head of the organization.

During the years that followed, it almos tseemed that Bill Clinton himself was the target of most of the high profile investigations conducted by the Bureau. As we all remember, it was one scandal after another.

This was, however, also a time of other developments - the bombing of the Khobar Towers, the Unibomber, Robert Hanssen the Soviet spy working at the FBI, the build up of the al Queda attack at the World Trade Center, and more.

Mr. Freeh's relationahip with Bill Clinton was strained (to say the least) and in this book he lays out a lot of the reasons why. Obviously his view is his own, Clinton's view is a bit different. Clinton supporters will hate it, others will love it.

In summary, this is one of those books that come out after the person leaves office and begins to explain to us what really happened. This is one story, other writers will produce others, and in ten years or so the historians will put it all together. As for this book, it is well written and tells what was going on in a very important agency during a critical time in its history. It is well worth reading.